


Gladiator

by Chekhovs_Power_Loader



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse, American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Come Eating, Creampie, Don’t copy to another site, Dubious Consent, F/M, Light BDSM, Loss of Virginity, Oral Sex, Shameless Smut, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-12 23:30:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17477006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chekhovs_Power_Loader/pseuds/Chekhovs_Power_Loader
Summary: Michael loves a good witch fight, but when a new gladiator refuses to kill in the arena, he loses his appetite for blood and develops an appetite for something else.





	1. Round One

“We’ll start with Fiona Goode versus Anastasia Romanov,” announces the robot with the face of a middle-aged woman.

The long-haired boy laughs from the Imperial Box.

“My dear Ms. Mead, you certainly know how to stack the deck. That poor Russian princess won’t know what hit her!”

It’s the robot’s job to pick the gladiators and stage the match-ups, but the longer they keep them going, the harder it gets to surprise him. Eventually, they will have exhausted every combination of witches ten times over, at least the ones who are willing to fight.

It’s amazing that he didn’t think of it sooner. Some witches were perfectly willing to take up the metaphorical sword and shield when he resurrected them the first time because, they figured, anything is better than being stuck in a personal hell where you live out your worst fears for eternity. Others were more of a gamble, especially the witches who imagine they are helping their sisters avoid even worse forms of punishment. Even fewer, he suspects, are still entertaining some hope of defeating the Antichrist, and the smallest number would rather have their souls vaporized than step one foot into his mini-Colosseum.

Michael has no use for the witch who refuses to fight. As for the type that might be plotting against him, she intrigues him to no end, makes him feel like he’s living on the edge. A little controlled chaos is essential to preserving his sanity these days.

“Next we’re going the millennial route with Mallory versus Madison.”

“Ooh, a new gladiator,” he hums in satisfaction. He’s been curious about this mysterious Mallory, the Supreme who never got to be one, ever since the battle at Outpost 3, where he surprised her in the bathtub after Cordelia so rudely plunged a dagger into her own chest. The little witch was in the act of casting some ridiculous spell, bleeding from the eyes with black water swirling all around her waist, and she screamed bloody murder when he yanked her out of the tub by the hair. She never told him what the spell was, not when he promised to explode her head, not even when he threatened to erase the soul of every Salem descendant on this scorched earth (she must have known he was bluffing), and yet Michael is determined to find out. If it takes his whole thousand-year reign, so be it.  

Sure, it makes little sense to raise his enemies from the dead and goad them into mortal combat while keeping them imprisoned a stone’s throw away, but how else is he supposed to relieve the intense boredom of constructing the New World, generation by generation? Humans are slower to breed than he realized, and the machine alternatives being developed by his R&D department have proved disappointing so far—so disappointing, in fact, that he was forced to dispose of the two roboticists who led the team and replace them with underlings.

Oh, who is he trying to kid? No one forced him to execute Mutt and Jeff. He’d been itching to do it before the world ended, ever since they botched the job on his Devil Mama 2.0, who was nothing like the original. Dressing them up as “Christians” and feeding them to the “lions” in his gladiatorial arena was just the icing on the cake.

“For the penultimate, I was thinking a little mama drama with Goode versus Foxx, just like you requested last week. The closer will be Dinah Stevens v Marie Laveau.”

“Classic Salem followed by classic voodoo. How you spoil me.” He rubs his hands with glee. Good old robot-Mead; at least she's always ready to serve.

Michael knows that some in the Sanctuary hate his blood sports and would rather be attending concerts, film screenings, charity galas, fashion shows, the ballet, or whatever other “civilized” entertainments they enjoyed in the Old World. He can’t bring himself to care. It’s called the Old World for a reason, and besides, his obedient subjects are so good at cheering and booing on cue, especially when he threatens them with a visit from a certain demon with a predilection for black latex suits.

While the underground arena isn’t anywhere the size of the Roman Colosseum, it does the job. The fighting area is perfectly round and surrounded by tiers of seats where his subjects gather depending on rank (and the only rank that matters here is the King’s favour). Two identical tables set near the gates, one for each opponent, contain all the implements of destruction, from knives and chains to poisons and mind-control dust. Michael likes his witches to be creative in how they dispatch their opponents, and rewards them handsomely if they manage to surprise him. An invisible fence guards the faithful from any danger that might spill out of the fighting area, whether flying daggers or errant spells.

The gong sounds thrice to start the battles, and Mead steps up to the microphone as a tinny snippet of “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” by Johnny Cash plays through the speakers.

The first gladiator needs no introduction. A beautiful older blonde enters through the western gate, swaggering in five-inch stilettos. She’s wearing a figure-hugging black dress and an honest-to-goodness witch’s hat, also black, with a wide brim and pointed cap.

Michael, bless him, likes his fighters to embody paper-thin stereotypes, so a witch like her is forced to exaggerate the traits that made her infamous in her lifetime. Luckily, the former Supreme knows her part to a T and plays it with gusto.

“Who’s the baddest witch in town?” She asks the audience rhetorically, picking up a mirror from the table and adjusting her hat theatrically.

The crowd goes wild crying the name of Fiona Goode.

“And who’s in charge here?

“You are!” They shout in one voice. “You’re in charge everywhere!”

“Damn right,” she preens. “Now, what dumb little witch-bitch thinks she can challenge me, Fiona Goode, legendary Supreme who reigned longer and grander than any other in recent memory?”

Michael smiles as the eastern gate opens to reveal a seventeen-year-old girl wearing imperial garb from the late nineteenth century, her dress a riot of lace, fur trimmings and embroidery, topped with pearl-and-diamond necklace. The girl is shy, but there’s nothing to hide behind except her luxurious brown hair. Eyes wide like an ingénue, she scans the crowd before noticing her fearsome opponent, then falls on her knees in despair.

Mead is back at the microphone, sounding less like a Roman _munerarius_ than a butler announcing guests at a high-society ball.

“Allow me to present the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, the last sovereign of Imperial—” 

“Blah, blah, blah,” Fiona interrupts. “We all know her story.”

Still at the table with the weapons, she's running her fingers along a couple of knives and an old-fashioned revolver before picking up a tumbler of whiskey and pouring herself a glass. Drink in hand, she approaches her cowering challenger, her eyes softening in a way only Anastasia can see.

“Listen, kiddo, there’s nothing I hate more than a show of weakness in a woman of our clan,” she whispers low enough that the audience can’t hear. “You girls need to learn to fight. I’ve said it before, but it’s never been more true: when witches don’t fight, we burn.”

The traumatized princess shakes her head, crying in accented English. “I won’t resist. Do what you like with me.”

“Fine, suit yourself,” Fiona speaks louder and more theatrically now, playing it up for the cheap seats. “A word of warning: where you’re concerned, I’m a one-woman Bolshevik revolution. Time to beat the Whites with the Red wedge.”

Finishing the rest of her drink in one go, the former Supreme drops the glass to the ground so it shatters into a thousand little pieces. Then she lifts one hand and the glittering shards go flying up, hovering in attack formation before hurtling towards the princess at incredible speed.

Surprise, surprise—the teenager has a few tricks up her embroidered sleeve. Totally unconsciously, without intending to perform any magic at all, Anastasia reverses the trajectory of the glass, halting it in mid-air before it doubles back in her opponent’s direction, embedding itself into her face and torso. She collapses with little fanfare, proceeding to bleed out from a myriad tiny cuts.

Gasps are heard from the audience, and a few wails of Fiona’s name. No one expected the Grand Duchess to do anything but expire prettily under the elder woman’s designer heel. The fight lasted a matter of seconds. They’ve never seen anything like it before. What’s especially odd to them is the state of the victor, who has collapsed into hysterics, assuring the guards who drag her out of there that she never meant to hurt anyone.

There is decidedly less tension in the Imperial Box.

Michael yawns, secretly disappointed that Fiona won’t be fighting Cordelia today. He’s been so looking forward to the mama drama. “That was unexpected, yet so, so boring. Remind me again why we can’t resurrect Baba Yaga?”

When no one else volunteers to answer, it falls to Anton LaVey to explain why one of his favorite gladiators had to be retired until further notice.

“She’s an absolute beast in the arena, Sire, but you never know what you’re getting with Baba Yaga. Sometimes she refuses to fight, other times she charges the faithful and gets zapped by the invisible fence, over and over again, until it’s sad to watch her…”

Michael nearly drops the platter of grapes he’s passing around. “It’s always funny, never sad!”

“Of course, Sire.” The Black Pope bows low. “It’s hilarious to watch the legendary forest hag burnt to a crisp by the barrier you’ve erected to protect us from the witches.”

Glaring at Anton, Mead tries to steer this meandering conversation away from the cliff of the boy’s displeasure. “The problem is that Baba Yaga never cares if you kill her or even threaten her immortal soul. She believes she’ll always rise again, as long as Russia endures.” 

“Ha! Someone should tell her that Russia is a nuclear wasteland.”

“Oh, we have tried, my Lord, but the hag is stubborn,” replies LaVey. “If you want my advice, the witches are plotting something against you. It’s too dangerous to have so many alive and gathered in one place.”

“I’ll be the one who decides what’s dangerous or not,” Michael replies through gritted teeth, and wonders if, next time, they could trying getting a chariot and some horses—not the radioactive ones, mind you, but healthy ones to pull a witch around the arena as she flings curses at the combatants or even yells a war cry or two.

Too bad he nuked all the zebras and ostriches.

Shriveled heart leaping in his chest, Michael suddenly remembers that the millennial witches from Robichaux’s are going next. Matched up with a reliable combatant like Madison, Mallory has little chance of winning the fight, and if by some miracle she does win it, she’ll have to choose between living another day and slaughtering her friend for Michael’s amusement.

Who knows? If the mysterious girl keeps making the right choices and he likes the way she fights, he might promote her to star gladiator, give her comfortable quarters in the Sanctuary where he lives with Mead and the rest of humanity’s future.

How wretched that future is turning out to be…

Looking around the stalls, it’s hard to tell that the people number 666, a nice round figure he likes to maintain the population at artificially, though sadly he can’t keep killing them if he has any intention of repopulating the planet and rebuilding humanity in his Father’s image.

The eastern gate opens to reveal Mallory, and she doesn’t disappoint. Dressed in combat boots and a lacy black number that reaches past her knees, she wears a defiant look on her classically pretty face and a gold flower crown on her head that Michael is a little shocked to see. Is that charming accessory meant to read as a challenge his authority? He dearly hopes so.

Ever typecast as the bad girl, Madison emerges from the opposite door with lit cigarette in her hand and a scowl twisting her TV-star features into something much uglier. She rolls her eyes as she delivers the obligatory line:

“Surprise, bitch. Bet you thought you’d seen the last of me.”

Still a little hung over from the night before—one of Michael’s subjects recognized her from a Hallmark movie and it's slim pickings in the Sanctuary when it comes to viable dick—she stumbles to the weapons table in her platforms and picks out a heavy chain that she proceeds to wrap around her neck, as if testing it out before launching it at her opponent.

The second Mallory opens her mouth, Michael knows where this is going.

“Madison, put down that chain. I don’t want to fight you. Let’s not give him the satisfaction.”  

The actress looks furious at her friend for ignoring the gravity of their situation. Then again, the goodie-goodie doesn’t have to face the prospect of returning to a personal hell where everyone mistakes you for Lindsey Lohan before realizing you’re not famous at all.

“Look, Mal, it’s not like we have any choice here, in this sick, sad, post-apocalyptic hellscape he's created. I have no desire to kill you, but fighting bitches once in a while is a lot better than working retail for the rest of eternity.”

Her logic is no good. Mallory won’t do it. Refusing to cooperate, she walks to the center of the arena and sits down on the concrete, crossing her legs to assume a meditative pose.

“What the fuck is this?” Someone yells from the audience. "Finish her!" hollers another. A few others try to get going a chant of “fight, fight, fight,” but it peters out due to lack of enthusiasm.

Frowning, Mead orders the girl to get up and pick her weapon. She doesn't comply.

Silence descends upon the arena. Rising from his throne with a flourish, Michael walks out of the Imperial Box and marches down the stairs towards the entrance, black cape flowing in his wake. No one dares to object as he looms over the uncooperative gladiator on the ground—not even those who know she was a rising Supreme before failing to stop the apocalypse.

“Mallory, I think it’s high time you and I had a little chat. In private.”

She follows him through the underground corridors leading away from the fight to the gladiators’ shabby quarters, but they never get there; instead, he pulls her into a secluded room that she supposes was a supply closet, once upon a time.

“Who do you think you are?” His voice drips with venom as she stares back in shock. “Refusing to cooperate, after all I’ve done to keep you alive, in my infinite mercy.”

“You’re only keeping me because you want to find out about the spell,” she retorts without a trace of respect. “And you never will.”

Examining her face at such close range, discovering new things in it every time, he finally decides on a course of action he’s been considering for a while now. Mallory looks too tempting for him not to trace a curious finger along her left cheek, noting the way she shivers under his touch as her pupils dilate. He licks his lips and prepares for his pitch, unsure of how it’ll be received.

“You won't talk about your magic. You won't fight. Is there any reason I should keep you alive?”

She shakes her head, proud to be useless, good for absolutely nothing. 

He smiles his most faux-innocent smile, exposing a line of perfect white teeth. “I think there may be one thing you are good for.”

She recoils as he leans closer to whisper something truly diabolical in her ear. When he steps away to see her reaction her face is contorted by disbelief.

“Huh. I’ve watched _Gladiator_ , and I don’t remember Commodus propositioning Maximus.”

“That’s because you have little education and even less imagination, Mallory. In ancient Rome it was perfectly common for gladiators to service wealthy women behind their husbands’ backs.”

“Let me get this straight,” she mutters, not sure if she heard correctly. “You want me, the witch you despise and have imprisoned for the pleasure of torturing until such a time as you decide to burn my soul to ash, to unburden you of your virginity? But you seem so… so…”

“Experienced? You would think that, given the sexual magnetism I exude from every pore so effortlessly. Any one of my followers would trample their mothers _and_ grandmothers for the chance to fuck me in any depraved way I can imagine. Isn’t it miraculous that I, a living god, chose little old you for the privilege?”

“I would like to say it’s an honor to be deemed worthy, but—”

“Oh, please. You’re no more worthy than any of your ‘sister’ witches. The whole lot of you ethereal scumbags is only slightly less revolting than the useless humans who bow and scrape at my feet, begging for the tiniest scrap of attention.”

“Then why—”

“It’s time to get this basic human experience under my belt.” He's amused by his own stupid pun, prompting Mallory to roll her eyes, which earns her another withering look. “You’re nothing special in the looks department, let me assure you of that. In fact, I would rate you as distinctly below average.”

This confuses her all over again. She’s always been realistic about her appearance, both its strengths and weaknesses, and she would hardly rate herself as ugly. If Michael thinks so, then surely a former Hollywood star like Madison Montgomery would be a better choice of de-virginator?

“I don’t want Madison! Or anyone else. It’s you who the fates have smiled upon. Now, do you accept the terms of our deal?”

“I accept.” She drops to her knees before the king, long hair sweeping the ground in a gesture of mock-deference. “Thank you for the dubious privilege of being the one to deflower your majesty. I’ll do my best to make the experience… tolerable for us both.” 

“More than tolerable, I should hope, but judging by your clothed appearance—” he grimaces as he scans her from head to toe, “—it’ll be a miracle if I don’t retch when you start to disrobe.”

By the time they’ve planned the evening, Mead and her guards are bursting through the door of the closet, having scoured the corridors for any sign of their missing king and his uncooperative gladiator. Rough arms are reaching around Mallory again, but she has time enough laugh in Michael’s face.

Little does she know that her laughter is music to his ears. “Be ready at 11 o’clock sharp. You’ll be delivered to my quarters by Ms Mead after she helps with your… presentation.”

She spits as she’s dragged away. “I can’t wait to disappoint you.”


	2. Round Two

The robot coos as she puts the finishing touches on the girl’s makeup, then stands back to admire her handiwork. 

“You look like a living doll.”

To her, that must be a compliment. In a few moments, when all this primping and plucking and polishing and plumping and perfuming is finally done, the once-future Supreme will be delivered to the victorious Antichrist, all trussed up for the feast, the feast being _her_.

A virtual stranger looks back at her from the mirror. And it’s not because Ms Mead did a bad job putting her look together. No, the girl in the mirror looks quite fetching in her column of black silk that hugs her curves in all the right places, much better than Mallory herself ever looked before the bombs fell and ushered in nuclear winter.

The girl’s face is a work of art. There is mascara on her lashes and dark shadow on her lids to accentuate the deep mahogany of her doe's eyes. There is pink gloss on her lips to emphasize their cupid-bow shape, and a floral scent applied to her pulse points to sweeten the air as warm blood pulses through her veins. There is color in her cheeks to make her look like the blushing virgin that she isn’t, and a bounce in her auburn curls as they cascade down her exposed back.

But there is no light in her eyes, no joy in her smile, and no spark to her spirit.

The girl in the mirror is a ghost, a pale memory from another, better life. It’s no use thinking about before.

The robot commands her to follow  and opens the door, waving her through with impatience. She’s told that Michael doesn’t like waiting, and that he’s been waiting for hours as while got ready for their first night together (and whose fault was that?), probably imagining all the nasty things he would do to her before the night was over.

Mallory shuts her eyes and chokes back tears. Bile rises in her throat at the memory of being herded into the arena with all those blood-thirsty spectators and ordered to fight Madison, to kill her sister if need be, and if she got killed in the process, to await her resurrection until the next round of battles when she would do it all over again.

Michael gave her a choice. Or: he made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Mallory has refused a lot of things already. She wouldn’t fight her sisters, for one, and she wouldn’t reveal what spell she was been performing at Outpost 3 when he surprised her in the black bathwater and yanked her out by the roots of her hair.

The exchange was fair, he thought, and she, to her enormous surprise, agreed. When he offered to spare not only _her_ life but also those of other sisters that refused to fight, Mallory didn’t have to think twice before agreeing to trade her body—no, her _cooperation_ , for he could take her body anytime he liked.

She has one final trick up her sleeve, however. In his infinite arrogance, Michael believes that the witches have lost, but they haven’t lost, not by a mile—not when the power has been growing inside Mallory ever since Cordelia’s first (and temporary) death. This power will fuel her second attempt at Tempus Infinituum, but only if she gets what she needs from him first.

Number one, a lock of Michael’s hair when he falls asleep, lulled into unconsciousness by her carnal sacrifice.

Number two, a few minutes alone in a bathroom equipped with a real tub, and without the robot’s eyes following her every move.

Mead leads Mallory down a long corridor with identical doors on either side. They stop at the end of the hallway before a door made of what looks like cast iron. In the middle of the door is an enormous knocker shaped like a devil’s head, complete with ram’s horns, pointed ears, and a heavy ring swinging from its sharp-toothed mouth.

The robot knocks three times and then waits, using that time to scan the girl from head to toe, checking her dress for stray pieces of lint. When she finds none, she does something truly wicked: she pinches and twists her nipples through the gossamer silk.

Mallory hugs her arms to her chest, face contorted in pain and shock. “Ow! What was _that_ for?”

The robot grins evilly before slapping her arms away. “That’s for being  a sullen witch bitch today, when my boy is expecting a little more… enthusiasm.”

Her cheeks burn in shame as she looks down at her nipples, which are pebbling right through the liquid fabric that clings to her every dip and curve of her body. She wills them to lie flat but it's no use; they persist in looking... enthusiastic.

Terrific. Now Michael is guaranteed to get the wrong idea when he finally answers the door.

Except it wouldn’t be the wrong idea exactly, now would it?

_Fuck me_ , Mallory thinks, and instantly regrets her choice of words. _Don’t fuck me._ But it’s too late. She’s being delivered to her enemy for that explicit purpose, and it dawns on her with a certain horror that there are _other_ changes in her body that she can’t blame on the robot or the temperature of the hallway. A genuine blush spreads over her cheeks beneath the painted one. Sparks travel up and down her spine with all the subtlety of an electrical storm as she thinks about what's about to happen behind that door. She recognizes the warm sensation between her legs as the advance guard of desire, the kind that floods your panties if you are wearing them (and she's not; the robot’s instructions were clear).

The iron door starts to open with a lecherous creak, revealing the last man on earth that she wants to see—and the one she's been dreaming about.

The man doesn’t greet her. He doesn’t move. When he opens the door, Michael just stands there for a long time, looking at Mallory through those perpetually hooded eyes of his, eyes that are the color of and clarity of a mountain glacier. His gaze is intense but she doesn’t look away, doesn’t flinch at being appraised—instead, she stares right back into that alpine abyss, until Mead clears her throat.  

“Here she is, my Dark Lord, the insubordinate and possibly very _dangerous_ young witch whose company you requested for your new experiment with human sexuality.”

_Experiment?_ Is that what Mallory is now, as well as being a prisoner and a gladiator?

The robot is clearly having trouble with her being chosen for this “experiment” of Michael's when the Sanctuary has so many better (read: less heretical) specimens of ripe womanhood. It’s obviously not Mead’s place to interfere in her Dark Lord’s choice of sexual partner, and yet interfere she must,  even at the risk of frying her logical circuitry from disobeying orders.

As if to punish Mallory for catching the eye of the normally disinterested Antichrist, the robot pushes her forward so she nearly stumbles into the arms of her host.  

“Thank you, Ms Mead. I’ll take it from here.”

Michael waves her away and grabs his guest by the elbow to pull her inside. His eyes sparkle with obvious interest as he secures the door with several locks and a deadbolt, then stands back to "appreciate" her with a vaguely menacing grin.

_Oh dear._ Why does she get the sick feeling that she’s about to enjoy every damn second of her defilement?

“Mallory,” he says her name slowly, savoring the syllables on his tongue as if they belonged to a lover, not a prisoner. “We got off on the wrong foot earlier, but I want us to be friends now. I didn’t bring you here to be abused.”

Friends? They can never be friends.

When he goes to brush a stray curl from her prettily made-up face, Mallory actively recoils from his touch. It takes her a while to realize, however, that any disgust she feels is less about Michael's actions than her own reactions to him being near. Whether she likes it or not, the sheer proximity of her enemy kindles a small bonfire in her loins; the heat is such a contrast to the chill that she feels when his icy stare travels down the front of her dress.

“I've never wanted anything from you except to be your friend," he lies. "Let me start by saying that you look divine tonight. Absolutely perfect.”

“Perfect for what? Stop using the language of romance for what is a glorified transaction.”

“Ouch.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re not.”

It’s true—she’s not really sorry. Michael has paid her a compliment, probably the sincerest kind that a man like him is capable of, and yet there goes Mallory, throwing her ingratitude in his finely chiselled face, looking a gift horse in the incredibly plush mouth.

The blue-eyed demon takes her by the arm and leads her into a resplendent space lit by dozens of candles and decorated in rich oak and burgundy velvet. The black jacket that he wears is cut from the same material, and under it he wears a black shirt buttoned up to his throat like a priest’s collar, teasing a sliver of skin. Black pants swathe his muscular legs, the fabric straining a little over his prominent crotch (his hand keeps straying there as he talks to her, as if daring her to notice).

His form is a playground for candlelight. It glints off his rings, which are set with all manner of rubies and obsidian stones, and plays off the startling planes of his face, and catches the occasional strands of his honey-blonde hair, which falls well past his shoulders.

An infuriating look of triumph dances in the corners of his pillowy lips.

Mallory wonders if Michael is nervous. If so, he’s hiding it well.

The Chosen One exudes a calculated, even _practiced_ sensuality that he uses to control his subjects by tapping into their deepest desires, promising them everything and delivering nothing but their eternal damnation. What he really feels is a mystery to Mallory—or _was_ a mystery, until now.

Beneath the thinnest veneer of gentlemanly seduction is a bottomless pool of ravenous desire, no, ravenous _drive_ to consume and destroy anything beautiful that crosses his path. 

As much as the Antichrist likes to tell the surviving witches that chaos has won, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t any rules. Michael has all sorts of rules for those descendants of Salem who wish their souls to remain on the right side of existence—that is, if you believe that existing is better than not existing, given the state of the world.

Mallory isn’t sure what she believes anymore as she takes her seat on the velvet sofa and crosses her legs, waiting for Michael to mix her a Bloody Mary. Their fingers accidentally touch when she takes the drink from his hand, and the crackle of electricity this sends running through her blood so disturbs her that she gulps it down in one go.  

Her skin is alternately hot to the point of boiling and chilled to the point of freezing. Sticky liquid pools between her legs. Her head swims. She shuts her eyes. Is that the alcohol taking effect? The cushion shifts with his weight as he sits down beside her. When she reopens her eyes, he is there, watching her with barely concealed hunger.

She doesn’t make the mistake of being flattered—this encounter has exactly nothing to do with her personal merit and everything to do with the novelty of the act and the shame that it’s guaranteed to bring her.

“Sweet Mallory, you look so, so… unhappy to be here. What can I do to make you more comfortable?”

He intends his voice to sound suave, dripping with the promise of carnal bliss. And it would work, too, if she couldn’t smell his impatience, the dark miasma of unsatiated greed mingling with the woody scent of his cologne.

It’s funny how he’s able to be so many different things at once. Physically, he looks like the apotheosis of all her secret desires, and yet psychologically he reminds her of a child told to wait in line at the candy store who then grabs the sugary treat right from the window display.

“Do whatever you want to me, Michael. I won’t fight back. But do it quick, before I change my mind and walk out of here.”

He laughs at that bit of impertinence, but she doesn’t need to tell him twice. Without so much as a “by your leave” Michael's large hands are all over her after guiding her to her feet, reaching to unhook the flimsy straps from her slim shoulders and watching as the dress falls down in a ripple of silk. The soft material pools around her stilettos; she stands her wobbly ground, even as her legs threaten to give out.

What does it feel like, she wondered before, to be entirely bare to his conquering gaze? Well, now she knows what it feels like as he takes in every inch of her skin, scrubbed and perfumed for this very purpose.

And what did she expect to happen instead? That her emperor would take his time to undress her? That he would ask her to perform a little striptease?

Maybe it's better to be stripped of her clothing all at once. That way, there are no illusions about the transactional nature of their devil’s bargain. Besides, she thinks, nudity itself is a kind of armor. The one who is nude isn't necessarily the one who feels ashamed, or the one who is moved by the sight.

Independently of her thoughts, Michael is discovering this truth as he steps back to admire this particular spoil of his dirty war. What could be better? Mallory is so pure and so ethereal and practically begging for ruination at his hands. And yet when her warm brown eyes connect with his colder blue ones, he's surprised to find no trace of fear there, no doubt, no shame.

Well. That's something he wasn’t expecting. But it’s a lot better than the deer-in-the-headlights look she wore on her face when he opened the door. 

He licks his lips. “Mallory, I do believe you’re glowing.” 

She cocks her head to one side. She doesn’t take the compliment.

“Glowing? But you haven’t even set me on fire. Yet.”

This gives him pause.

“Really, have you so little faith in my offer of kindness? It would never occur to me to burn your soul out of existence. The only burning you’ll experience tonight is the burning of desire, for me.”

When she rolls her eyes at his grandiosity, even he has to admit that it sounded better in his head. But she's not done flinging her arrows.

“I thought you said you’re a virgin.”

How dare she?

“My Father supplied me with all the carnal knowledge I’ll ever need, so you needn't be concerned about _that_.”

It's another poorly worded sentence, and this time it makes her laugh out loud.

“Are you saying that Satan taught you everything you need to know about sex? I wonder how that works. Did he take your hand and—”

“Enough!”

If anyone else dared to address him in such an insolent manner, he would cut out their tongue and then flay them for good measure and turn their skin into a lampshade. With Mallory, however, he finds that it doesn’t matter as much.

He is fascinated. He is challenged. He is even a little scared, if he’s being honest with himself, but it's the exciting kind of fear. 

Hands clasped behind his back, he circles her like a predator would his prey, examining his disobedient little witch from every angle (and every angle is flattering). Even if he wanted to peel his eyes away from her proud, upright form, he would find it next to impossible.

Strange. He doesn’t normally experience desire in the conventional sense, yet there is something about this girl that is different, that makes Michael feel different. He intends to find out what it is, and he'll take her apart in the process if he has to.

Mallory is her name. Derived from the French _maloré_ , it means the unlucky one, and he finds it appropriate. For some unfathomable reason, Lady Luck has shunned this poor girl from the cradle to the grave, giving her cousin Lady Misfortune free reign to litter her path with endless obstacles and disappointments. Compared with what Michael has read in Mallory’s file, the end of the world was just the icing on her shit cake. 

But what if the very thing that made the girl so unfavored in the old world marks her as perfect for the new one? Michael could have used a witch like this during all those boring months he spent orchestrating the Armageddon and then trying to germinate the seed of a better humanity from its ashes—a humanity without the human frailty, a humanity without the need for connection. 

Yes, _trying_ to restart the human race—that's the operative word, if he's being honest with himself. Michael doesn’t know what he’s doing with that precisely, and his Father hasn’t been a tremendous help to him over the years. While Satan _did_ warm a little to his blundering son when said son managed to drop the nukes (or his henchmen did), soon the novelty wore off and they were back at square one, with the old man not returning his calls.

All that would change with the Unlucky One on his side, Michael is sure of it. Mallory is a diamond in the rough, a queen among pawns, a free thinker among zombies who only follow the light.

Plans form in his mind. Castles build themselves in the air. A city rises up from the irradiated ground, iron-walled and black-spired and fortified to the metal teeth. And tall—taller even than the Tower of Babylon when God struck it down.

Michael creeps up behind Mallory with no warning and sweeps her hair back so that he can wrap both his hands around her swan-like neck. He tips her head back and squeezes lightly on her throat until he locates her pulse—it's not slow and languid like he hoped, but weak and hurried, like the beating of a hummingbird's wing. What looked like fearlessness earlier is anything but.

Playing doctor, Michael pretends to measure her heartbeat as it hammers away in her chest, feeling the pulsations of something more than just her lifeblood. There is magic in there too, ancient and elemental magic, an ethereal coil ready to spring up and strike out in self-defense, should anyone be foolish enough to provoke it with violence.

He doesn't plan to; all he wants is to intimate her a little, if he can.  She’s brave, this girl, but not without fear. He loves the way that her pulse quickens as his hand finds the most vulnerable spot over her jugular; meanwhile his other hand is tracing the contour of one perky breast, marveling at how perfectly it fits into his palm. Her pulse jumps even more as his lips replace the fingers on her throat and he plants the first of many sloppy kisses along the edge of her jaw.

What is Mallory feeling as all this is happening, seemingly without her consent?

Her first reaction is to close her eyes and lean into the sensation, and she does this for a while, exposing more of her neck to be kissed while falling backwards into his waiting arms. But soon the scales fall from her eyes and she catches herself in the act of surrendering and remembers her mission—no, she can’t give in so easily, won’t allow him to dictate the pace of their hideous coupling. If she has any hope of preserving her dignity, Mallory knows that it’s time to take charge.

The first thing that she does is to squirm out of his tight embrace. All it takes is a quick elbow to the gut to push him off her completely. Her next move is to slip off her stilettos so that she can stand more solidly on the ground. He towers over her now, but it doesn’t matter. They face each other like boxers in the ring, or gladiators in the arena, and the power disparity would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic.

Mallory is fully naked while Michael is fully clothed, and yet there’s no trace of weakness or shame in her eyes. She’s no Eve quivering behind a fig leaf after eating of the forbidden fruit. And there’s no expelling her from Garden either, she thinks as she raises herself to her full height and takes a few confident steps in Michael's direction.

It disorients him entirely, steals his breath and stops his brain, when Mallory surges forward to kiss him. She does press her lips on his for very long—it's more of a ghost's kiss as her lips quickly depart and her breath plays over his cheek while her fingers tangle in his hair, pulling a few strands loose just for the sport of it.

She doesn’t intend to play nice. He wouldn’t want her to.

“Is this what you imagined it would be like?” Mallory whispers in Michael's ear, daring him to return fire. She’s breathing more heavily now, chest rising and falling, in total control of her performance—and it's very much a performance. It takes Michael a while to realize that his little witch has more self-control in her delicate pinkie than he does in his whole near-invincible body, and he’s a war machine literally bred for destruction.

Mallory wills him to wait, to obey the pace she has set, but he won’t, he _can’t_ wait, it would be a crime against nature to expect him to. When their faces collide a second time, it’s because he grabs her by the throat and draws her in, and for a split second it’s a mad crash of lips and gums and teeth, with Michael trying to gain entry to the well-defended sanctum of her mouth and Mallory repelling the intruder before finally succumbing to the battering ram of his tongue.

So _this_ is a kiss, he thinks. How to describe it?

A kiss is a denial.

He tastes but doesn’t consume. He plunders but doesn’t conquer. He touches but doesn’t possess.

It’s infuriating and yet also addictive, this deferral of possession second by agonizing second, this multiplication of desire for the thing that is always just out of reach.

And finally Michael gets it, _really_ gets it, the reason why humanity is so eager to follow his Father down the garden path of damnation.

What’s the guarantee of an infinitely purer love in Heaven to the mere promise of a lowly carnal encounter, a quick and humiliating roll in the muck?

“Are you okay?” Mallory asks when he pulls back to catch his breath.

Lust has blown his pupils so wide that they swallow up the pale blue of his irises, reminding her of lunar discs during a solar eclipse. And for the first time she understands what a pupil really is: the black hole of another person’s vision of you, the abyss where another soul resides.

“I’ve never been better,” he replies. His grip around her waist tightens as he pulls her towards him until she feels something rock-hard press against bare stomach. She doesn’t slip out of his grasp—no, the little minx actually _leans_ into the hard thing, not minding a bit.

Michael finds that he's in a grandiose, wordy kind of mood.

“Your mouth tastes of ambrosia, the sweet nectar that kept the ancient gods eternally young,” he babbles in her ear, earning a mocking laugh for his trouble.

“Wrong pantheon,” she retorts, like she thinks that he got his polytheisms and monotheisms mixed up. He didn't, but he can’t muster a single objection. Because it doesn’t matter.

He—Michael, a person who is half-divine and thus knows the precise configuration of everything from the nine orders of angels to the nine circles of Hell—would happily burn sacrifices to a trillion false idols if it would ensure that he would get to taste _this_ every day.

Next thing that Mallory knows, she’s being and hoisted over his shoulder like she’s no heavier than a feather, and the ceiling is spinning as he carries her to what she presumes is his bedroom and drops her onto a soft bed covered with black satin.

With a feverish urgency, eager to take advantage of her vulnerable pose, he removes his clothes and drops them into a messy pile by the foot of the bed. He practically tears off the buttons on his shirt in his impatience, and fails to kick off his boots fast enough so he can join her on the bed. 

Once every bit of his clothing is gone, Mallory stares. Just stares. She can’t help it.

There the Antichrist stands in all his naked glory, looking less like the corrupted son of the Most Foul than the golden god at the center of some forgotten solar cult.

His body looks is chiselled from Greek marble. His hair is a riot of sunbeams. And his hand is wrapped around a thick and perfectly shaped cock whose weeping head is pointed squarely in her direction.

When he practically leaps on top of her and playfully sinks his teeth into her shoulder, Mallory pretends to struggle. It takes Michael only a fraction of his real strength to pin her delicate wrists above her head, while his other hand reaches down between her legs to cup her essence. A single ringed finger slips between her folds noisily and disappears up to the knuckle.

“I can’t believe how wet you are,” he rasps in her ear.

She can’t believe it either. It's even harder to believe that he’s a virgin from the clever way that a second finger is invading her cunt, followed by a third—and maybe a fourth? She blushes at the decadent moans that escape her lips and the wet squelching sounds that accompany them even as it's too much, too soon, and too rough—but why, then, are her hips rising to meet each of his undisciplined thrusts, egging him on to go even faster?

Mallory nearly loses her mind when Michael lets go off her wrists—though without releasing them; he simply uses his magic to keep them pinned above her head—and begins to work on her clit, rubbing furious little circles into the over-sensitive flesh. She keens and thrashes around in the sheets like a wounded gazelle in the jaws of a hungry lion, and Michael very nearly wounds her for real when he lowers his mouth to her left breast and grazes her areola with his teeth. The pain subsides when he laves and sucks it away, and her right breast gets the same treatment as her sister, with Michael pulling back to admire how the reddened peaks glisten with his saliva. His hands never stop working their practical magic down below, bringing her ever closer to release.  

“Mallory, I need to… I want to….”

His voice is halting and his plea incoherent, yet she understands him anyway and nods her permission. 

"Only if you say 'please,'" she teases.

Immediately he brings the hand that was just pumping between her legs up to his mouth so he can lick her copious juices off his fingers, not letting a single drop go to waste. Guiding his cock to her entrance, he plunges in without any ceremony and buries himself up to the hilt with a groan. He magically releases the invisible bonds that restrain her arms, freeing her hands to grip his shoulders for dear life as he tucks  a pillow under her ass to penetrate her at a better, deeper angle.

This—this will be his ruin.

Overwhelmed by the feeling of Mallory’s legs wrapping around his back as he thrusts against the final barricade of her cervix, Michael closes his eyes and hisses a sibylline prayer to whatever mysterious deity blessed their unlikely union. Whether said deity resides in Hell below or Heaven above, he doesn’t know and doesn’t care.

Her fingernails aren't sharp enough to break the skin as they drag across his muscular back in tandem with his furious thrusts, each one more pleasurable than the last. He wonders if she'll break like all the living toys from his childhood, the ones that he took apart to slake his blood lust, or simply to satisfy his curiosity about how they worked.

But Mallory doesn’t break. Instead, she moans with exquisite abandon. Her sweet voice gets louder and louder as she nears her first peak, the one that pulls a long strangled cry from her throat as her inner walls clench around his cock, triggering his own long-delayed release and eliciting an animal grunt. 

At that moment, Michael wants one thing more than anything else: to connect with her physically _and_ spiritually, to look deep into her eyes at the peak of her pleasure.

Imagine his disappointment, then, when Mallory shuts her eyes at the very instant that Michael begins to convulse, gripping her face as he paints her insides with jets of hot cum. 

“Look at me,” he wails, riding out the final spasms of his orgasm, but she doesn’t look at him, doesn't connect. Her eyes are still shut.

Why?

Because Mallory knows that if she were to open her eyes, the tears would come in an unstoppable flood.  

Michael stares at her in disbelief when the tears come anyway.

“Why are you crying, little witch? Did I do something wrong? Did I hurt you in a way you didn’t like?”

“No,” she grits through her teeth, but privately she’s fuming over his choice of words, the implication that there is a _right_ way to hurt her.

“Then what’s making you so upset, lovely one?” 

“It’s nothing,” she lies, sniveling like a child into the black satin sheets meant for adult games. Michael has the audacity to look puzzled by her tears, even as he makes no move to detach himself from her body; his now deflated cock is still buried inside the bruised and battered hole that he was recently abusing (or driving to new heights of ecstasy, depending on your perspective).

From Mallory's perspective, his soft words sound false, rehearsed. There's no way that he really cares how she feels. She's wounded his fragile ego, nothing more.

“Okay, I’ll be honest with you, Michael. It’s _everything_. Everything is wrong. Nothing is right. Nothing will ever be right again.”

For a while there she was flying, deluding herself as she ascended to vertiginous heights, carried aloft on the wings of pleasure; but an equally dizzying fall comes after every Icarian flight too close to the sun, and Mallory is losing altitude faster than she expected, crashing down to the earth in a mess of white feathers and melted wax.  

What was she thinking? That fucking Michael Langdon would be a simple matter, little more than a mechanical act? That she could detach her mind from her physical sensations, as if her body were just a meat-puppet for her spirit to don and discard?   

It was foolish enough to think that she could undertake such a gargantuan task on her own. She _has_ the raw power, that much is certain, but she lacks the proper frame of mind. And now it's too late to save her sisters and restore the world by resetting the timeline—now Michael is all but guaranteed to kick her out of his rooms before he falls asleep and she can complete her mission.

Mallory turns her face away from him and buries her nose in the pillow, proceeding to bawl her eyes out all over again. Why is she always so unlucky?

It feels like a gross perversion of intimacy when Michael strokes her hair and she feels his breath hitch in his chest and hotly caress the shell of her ear.

It’s wrong that his cum is still inside her, with nowhere to go, and it's even wronger that the knowledge of it makes her blush to the roots of her auburn hair.

It almost strikes her as sad—almost, but not quite—that the Antichrist lacks the self-awareness to understand how truly monstrous he appears through the eyes of the same humanity that his Father so loves to hate. Proud of the fact that he destroyed the world and thus fulfilled his life’s purpose, Michael honestly thought, at first, that the surviving witches would fall to their knees and worship him as their god-king—maybe not all the witches perhaps, but most, a good number to stoke his delusions of grandeur. But it never came to be, and if he couldn't beget worship, he settled for violence. Now Michael strides around his pretend-coliseum where he stages his fights, fiddling like Nero while Rome burned, and delighting in the minute weaknesses of his former enemies and current playthings, the ones who almost foiled his plans.

Almost. There’s a lot of power in that _almost._   

Because nothing should be taken for granted. Not even the end of the world.

Mallory decides to ask him a personal question. “Did it bring you joy?”

“What?” His lids hang low with the memory of recent lust as he answers in a voice roughened by exertion. "Did what bring me joy?"

“You know what, Michael. The Apocalypse.”

He laughs and it sounds innocent, like the tinkling amusement of a man with a light conscience.

“You sound just like Marie Kondo. Yes, Mallory, ending the world sparked a whole fuckload of joy.”

“I see," she says to the man who basically KonMaried the world. "So why do you make us fight?”

He quirks an eyebrow. “Excuse me? I don’t see the connection.”

“If you’re so full of joy about the Armageddon and your NWO, why do you waste your time by making us fight each other until there’s only one witch left standing in the arena? What’s the point? Why not just kill us all and eliminate the threat to your reign once and for all?”

“Why?” His interest has been piqued, but not enough to get him to move off her body. “Because you people like to believe that your defining quality is your selflessness, or at least your sociable nature, your desire, no, your _need_ , to connect with others whom you see as extensions of yourselves and who thus demand your care and respect.”

“Let me guess: that’s not who we are, deep inside? We’re all solitary evil motherfuckers or something.”

He smiles. She knows him so well already, and they’ve only just begun. In fact, all this talk of evil motherfuckers has his cock stirring back to life—and just when he was about to withdraw from her cunt, giving her a chance to rest before the next time he pile-drives her into oblivion. 

“When I was a child, if you could call it that, my grandmother would leave me unsupervised for hours at a time while she ran errands, paid social calls, and did fuck only knows what else. Nannies were out of the question so I was always alone and had to become very good at entertaining myself. Anyway, I developed an interest in trapping small animals such as mice, rats and sparrows, and creating little kingdoms of chaos for them, seeing which ones would die and which survive once I made their resources scarce, depriving them of food, water, shelter and any other thing they were willing to kill for.”

He runs a threatening hand around her throat when she looks at him funny. Her look sends an electric current straight to his hardening cock.

“You see, I already had an inkling that the animals were just a dress rehearsal for some larger, grander design, a new world where only the strongest and cruelest deserved to live.”

“Is that all we are to you, us witches?” Mallory tries her best to sound casual, conversational even, now that her tears have dried into ugly streaks on her cheeks. “Just some rats in a cage? You could have paid us the honor of burning our souls into nothing, returning us to the common condition of the universe—”

“Are you a nihilist, Mallory? Drop the mask. It doesn’t suit you.”

His smile is fittingly devilish when he finally—finally—pulls out of her, only to slip down her body and rotate her hips so that her pussy is splayed on his face, glistening darkly like a fat clam that contains the rarest and most beautiful pearl in the whole South Seas.

Mallory whimpers in protest when she realizes what he's about to do. The whole cycle is beginning again as Michael pins her in place and prepares to receive the wine of their unholy communion on his tongue: the slow melange of _his_ cum and _her_ juices seeping out of her hole with agonizing slowness.

“That’s not what I… ahhh, Michael, s-stop… n-no, _don’t_ stop….”

She doesn’t want him touching her again, at least not right away, and yet it’s impossible to resist the sight of him between her legs, ready to lap up the remnants of their shared bliss. This desire to taste himself as he tastes her, it must be another manifestation of his narcissism. But what does it mean when he's flipping her around on the bed so they _both_ get a front-row view of the other's pleasure—he of her still-leaking cunt and she of his impressively sized cock?

Mallory whines loudly when he penetrates her with his tongue. It's a miracle that she still has the presence of mind to grasp his shaft and lick a tentative stripe up its sensitive underside, a gesture thathe reacts to with a full-body shiver and a localized twitch where she's holding him by the root. He's more focused than she is on the task at hand: nothing distracts him from eating her pussy like it’s his last meal on Earth.

Getting into the groove, Mallory takes him deep in her mouth, all the way to the hilt, and as many times as it takes for the tension to build, alternating this with soft kitten licks on his leaking head, even as the powerful waves reverberating through her core threaten to finish her off right then and then. It's her turn to swallow when he moans from the pit of his being and spends himself a second time down her throat. 

Later, as he slumbers with an oddly peaceful expression on his face, having made her come many times in many different positions, she rises from the bed with a heavy heart and goes to complete her mission, harvesting a single lock of his golden hair.

 

*****

The boy is alone, as usual, playing in the garden with a cardboard box full of what his grandmother calls his “little friends.” She says it so meanly because the boy has no human friends. Other children street clear when he appears in their vicinity, even when he tries to talk to them. Especially when he tries to talk to them.  

The mice are afraid of him too, but not as suspicious. They have too little mental awareness to understand the threat that he poses to their species, and to _every_ species really on God’s green Earth.  

Ever since the boy was old enough to remember his dreams, he’s been dreaming of a single catastrophe, a flame deluge that would cleanse all goodness from the world, leaving only the rot and the aberrations.

The rodents in the shoe box are merely practice for this other world that he plans to build one day, situating it deep underground when the surface becomes a toxic wasteland.

The boy rattles the box and watches a large male mouse tear into the jugular of a female one, smiling when the blood spurts everywhere.

But he’s no longer alone. A girl is watching him from behind one of Constance’s manicured hedgerows. She looks around his age, but he knows that she's older, like they all are.

_That's_ another thing that makes him a monster, growing a decade overnight. 

“What have you got there? Show me.”

He holds up his little kingdom of chaos for her to see. He takes out a trophy, a mouse with the head half-detached from his limp body.

She frowns when he tries to give her this gift. She doesn’t like it, none of them do. But unlike the others, she does something about it, breathing into the box and muttering a spell to make the bloodied mice come alive again.

The boy is in awe. “How did you do that? What _are_ you?”

The girl reverses the box into the grass and watches the mice scurry away before telling him that her name is Mallory and that she’s a witch. He asks if he’s one, too.

"You're not a witch, Michael." Somehow she knows his name. "You're not a warlock either."

He's not sure what to make of this news, or what to make of her reaction to it, but she doesn't seem to mind. He feels the weight of anxiety lift from his chest, leaving him lighter. He smiles.

“That thing you did to the mice. Can you show me?”

Her smile is wide as extends her right hand and Michael takes it.

"Only if you say 'please.'"

 


End file.
